The Lucid Vigil

Deconstruction, Desire and the Politics of Critique

Stella Gaon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138610828
• eBook ISBN: 9780429879036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Winner of the 2020 Symposium Book Award by the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy

Stella Gaon provides the first fully philosophical account of the critical nature of deconstruction, and she does so by turning in an original way to psychoanalysis. Drawing on close readings of Freud and Laplanche, Gaon argues that Derridean deconstruction is driven by a normative investment in reason's psychological force. Indeed, deconstruction is more faithful to the principle of reason than the various forms of critical theory prevalent today. For if one pursues the classical demand for rational grounds vigilantly, one finds that claims to ethical or political legitimacy cannot be rationally justified, because they are undone by logical undecidability. Gaon's argument is borne out in the cases of Kantian deontology, Deweyan pragmatism, progressive pedagogy, Habermasian moral theory, Levinasian ethics and others. What emerges is the groundbreaking demonstration that deconstruction is impelled by a quasi-ethical critical drive, and that to read deconstructively is to radicalize the emancipatory practice of reason as self-critique.

This important volume will be of great value to critical theorists as well as to Derrida scholars and researchers in social and political thought.

Part I

Naming the Stakes

1 The Danger of Rhetoric

That deconstruction could contribute something to the question of justice, possible or impossible, is taken as either self-evident or met with outrage these days (and hence in both cases remains unthought) … Deconstruction’s ethico-political pertinence is either (1) taken for granted (often but by no means always presumed to be “progressive”) with an appeal to its thematic or referential considerations of issues (democracy, torture, “race,” feminism, the university and teaching, apartheid) or to its formal homologies with political interventions (the deconstruction of authority as emancipatory or as ideology-critique), or (2) condemned (as nefariously antipolitical or paralyzing) because it appears to ruin the categories on which political discourse has tried to found itself for as long as anyone can remember: subjectivity and agency, and the reliable knowledge (meaning, whether positively, theologically, or hermeneutically determined) that “allows” it to act.

(Keenan 1995, 263)

Education has long been considered to be one of the most fundamental cornerstones of liberal, democratic society. Indeed, modern Western European ideals of education are imbued with the Enlightenment belief that human reason is the ultimate faculty through which human beings (qua “Man”) can achieve not only epistemological truth, but moral goodness and social reform. For, as I will show, when Immanuel Kant first formulated the “categorical imperative” – when, that is to say, he made the strong argument that moral values can be logically determined in rational, universal terms on the basis of the pure use of (practical) reason – he clearly linked ethics to that same logic, or “true” knowledge, on which modern epistemology depends. For theorists and philosophers of education this link has been decisive: both the traditional (modernist) project of education of the people and, alternatively, various critical and progressive projects of education for the people, have founded emancipation from “natural want and social injustice” (Misgeld 1992, 125) upon the acquisition of knowledge and the enhancement of critical reason.¹ Within this tradition, moreover, criticism, knowledge and justice (“the good”) are sharply opposed to ideology, opinion and injustice (the unethical). This opposition between justice and ideology continues to underline characterizations of the school as one of the founding sites of liberal and/or radical democracy.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the epistemological “crisis” of postmodernity – the so-called “postmetaphysical” or post-enlightenment position that there is no universal subject whose “truth” can be determined absolutely – has thrown the educational ideal into radical question. In other words, the argument that representations of almost any kind of “truth” are contingent in a variety of ways (historically, culturally, racially, in respect of gender or class, etc.) – and, hence, are to some extent implicated in ideology, opinion and injustice – has led some intellectuals to the conclusion that if rational truth is contestable, then the moral values which have been founded upon it are only relative.

This apprehension – and it is one shared not only by many theorists of education, but also by critical theorists more generally – stems, I shall argue, from a mistaken, though unfortunately common, belief about the normative implications of so-called “postmodernism.”² It is the belief that theorists who have “decentred” the modern (universal) subject and thereby relativized the truth, such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan or Jean-François Lyotard, have effectively annihilated the very basis of a modernist ethico-political sensibility. Such theorists are charged, in effect, with endangering the social reform (the democracy) promised by traditional and progressive educational or political projects alike. It is this charge – or, more accurately, the ethico-political assumptions that underline it – that the present inquiry is intended to address.

Political philosopher Jürgen Habermas, for example, mobilized just these assumptions when he first accused Jacques Derrida of “levelling the genre distinction between philosophy and literature” and with thereby ‘robbing’ “philosophical thinking” of its “seriousness” and its “substance” (Habermas 1987, 185, 210). Indeed, the specific accusation that Derrida and other poststructuralists have made philosophy into, merely, a kind of literary or aesthetic object that is infinitely open to interpretation has become such a standard rebuttal to Derrida and other contemporary French philosophers that its mere citation is often accepted as an adequate conclusion to any substantive discussion.

Consider, for instance, Axel Honneth’s claim that the “theoretical framework of interpretation” of the “postmodern conception” may be “a Nietzschean tinged concept of aesthetic freedom” (Honneth 1992, 164), or Christopher Norris’s belief that it is the “desire to make reality over into an aesthetic phenomenon – to collapse the whole range of ontological distinctions between life and art, fact and fiction, history and poetry, truth and appearance – which typifies the current postmodernist drive against the Enlightenment and all its works” (Norris 1993, 63, 253; my emphasis). By the same token, Seyla Benhabib has asserted that “contextualism and post-modernism … reject that criticism of validity and legitimacy can be formulated, and transform philosophy into literary criticism, aphorism, or poetry” (Benhabib 1986, 15). Amy Gutmann, similarly, has characterized what she calls “deconstructionism” as a “dangerous,” “anti-intellectual, politicizing threat” to academies of higher learning – those bastions of “knowledge, understanding, intellectual dialogue and the pursuit of reasoned argument” (Gutmann, ed., 1994, 19, 20).

These examples illustrate the wide agreement that “postmodernism” in general and deconstruction in particular “relativize” or “aestheticize” those truths on which democratic political projects must be based. Gutmann is particularly clear on this; she finds deconstruction single-handedly responsible for turning all claims to political validity into unmitigated bullying or posturing. In fact, Gutmann argues, the deconstructionist view even “deconstructs” itself, for “the less powerful cannot possibly hope to have their standards win out, especially if their academic spokespersons publicize the view that intellectual standards are nothing more than assertions or reflections of the will to power” (1994, 19). Thus, Gutmann provides a more precise specification of Habermas’s concern; the advent of “deconstructionism” in the university threatens the loss of the training in reasoned argument that schools provide and, concomitantly, the evisceration of the promise of a justice that transcends politics. “Deconstructionism,” in short, threatens the very lifeblood of a democratic society (Gutmann 1994, 23–4).

One response to such dire predictions, to be sure, would be to take issue with each one of these charges on a case-by-case basis. For just as Benhabib’s and Habermas’s assertions that Derrida is engaged in a purely literary levelling of philosophical reflection can be countered on the basis of a careful reading of Derrida’s work, so Honneth would be hard-pressed to demonstrate, rather than merely to assert, that all critics of the Enlightenment necessarily follow Nietzsche. Similarly, it could well be argued that Gutmann’s characterization of all critics of the liberal arts canon as “deconstructionists” will not hold up to scrutiny, while Christopher Norris, for his part, might find it as difficult to defend the absolute purity and autonomous status of his classical, “ontological distinctions,” as he would to substantiate his generalization that there is currently a “postmodernist drive” to “collapse” them.

While the formulation and substantiation of specific counterarguments is undoubtedly important, however, I do not propose to treat each of these debates in all their particulars here. For what I want to underline is that, taken together, such ethico-political fears about deconstruction and/or “postmodernism” evidence a profound misunderstanding of what relevance specific critiques of reason – and especially those undertaken by Derrida – might have for critical political theory in general, and for critical theories of education in particular. This misunderstanding is most clearly articulated by Christopher Norris, who writes,

postmodernism can do nothing to challenge … forms of injustice and oppression since it offers no arguments, no critical resources or validating grounds for perceiving them as inherently unjust and oppressive. In the end, all this rhetoric of “plurality” and “difference” comes down to just another, more radical-sounding version of Rorty’s neopragmatist message, that is to say, his advice that we should cultivate the private virtues … and cease the vain effort to square those virtues with a sense of our larger (public, social, ethical or political) responsibilities. Postmodernism cannot do other than promote this view insofar as it rejects the principle advanced by critical-enlightenment thinkers from Kant to Habermas. (Norris 1993, 287)

If this misunderstanding of Derrida’s work³ still persists so many decades after the publication of Of Grammatology (Derrida 1976 [1967]), this may be because references to the “aestheticizing” and hence “apolitical” nature of deconstructive writing are often accepted as an adequate end to the dispute. This itself should stand out as a point of interest. For the most remarkable thing about these accusations is not that one group of scholars disagrees vehemently with another, but rather that the charge is taken to speak for itself.

Among the critics cited here, for example, Honneth relies on only a few scant references to Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition and Jean Baudrillard’s, Die Agonie des Realen to support the claim that a Nietzschean, “aesthetic model of human freedom is what underlies, in one way or another, all versions of a theory of the ‘postmodern’” (1992, 167; emphasis mine), Gutmann (1994) neglects to cite a single theorist in support of her claims, and Habermas’s treatment of Derrida is largely given over to a discussion of literary critics Jonathan Culler, Hillis Miller and Geoffrey Hartman – on the basis, he says, that Derrida “does not belong to those philosophers who like to argue” and that the discussion between Derrida and John Searle is “somewhat impenetrable” (Habermas 1987, 193, 194).⁴

If Christopher Norris (who has investigated Derrida’s thought comprehensively) is a notable exception among this group, it is not because he treats the relationship between the discourses of the European Enlightenment and the discourses of the (so-called) “postmodern” in a more nuanced way. Rather, it is because, in contrast to his colleagues, Norris places Derrida squarely on the side of modernity. Norris takes issue, for instance, with the Habermasian charge that Derrida eschews argumentation in favour of literary ‘tricks,’ arguing that such a criticism “involves the kind of typecast binary thinking that refuses to see how a ‘literary’ text – or one which exploits a wide range of stylistic resources – might yet possess sufficient argumentative force to unsettle such deep-laid assumptions” (Norris 1992, 190, emphasis his; and 1993, 89).⁵ To the extent that Derrida’s strategies of reading reflect, on Norris’s view, “a distinctly Kantian form of argument,” Norris declares that “Derrida has distanced his own thinking from a generalized ‘post-modern’ or post-structuralist discourse” (1992, 167) and that “deconstruction, properly understood, belongs within that same ‘philosophical discourse of modernity’ that Habermas sets out to defend against its present-day detractors” (1992, 170). For Norris no less than the others, therefore, it can be taken as read that the line between the modern and the “postmodern” can be clearly delineated; if Derrida were to be guilty of that “aestheticizing” tendency characteristic of the “postmodern” in general (Norris 2004, 353), the French philosopher might be as easily dismissed. Indeed, Norris says, one can add “post-structuralism, postmodernism, Foucaldian ‘genealogy’ (or discourse-theory), and at least one variety of deconstruction as practised by (mainly American) literary critics,” to a “catalogue” of thinkers for whom,

it is a high point of doctrine that “truth” is nothing more than what counts as such according to the codes, cultural conventions, power/knowledge interests, “intertextual” relationships and so forth which make up the conditions of intelligibility within this or that field of “signifying practice.” (1993, 102–3)

How is it that one need only cite one of a series of charges (of formulas, in effect) which distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’ philosophy? How is it that such widespread dismissiveness can overcome scholarly debate? The answer, one can only surmise, is that there is at work a powerful and deeply-held set of assumptions behind these claims. The question at hand, therefore, is what kind of assumption or, rather, what set of assumptions, might serve to render the scholarly requirements of textual substantiation, argumentative rigour and careful attention to content and form moot in these responses to a particular body of scholarship?

One such assumption, to be sure, is the Enlightenment belief that ethical and political ‘goods’ can be established in rational and hence universal terms. The “postmodern” postulation that what counts as “truth” may be determined on the grounds of racial, gender-related, class-based, historical, cultural, religious or otherwise contingent interests profoundly challenges this belief, and this challenge has in turn resulted in widespread fears concerning the political perils of “postmodern” theorizing. Yet this assumption should and can be made more precise in light of a significant clue provided in Habermas’s reading of Derrida. For Habermas specifies that what is more narrowly at issue in deconstruction – and, presumably, in any form of “postmodern” theorizing that shares its ostensible “aestheticizing” tendency – is that “Derrida is particularly interested in standing the primacy of logic over rhetoric, canonized since Aristotle, on its head” (Habermas 1987, 187). Thus, the Kantian link between ethics and epistemology (via logic) that is taken for granted in the dominant response to “postmodernism” is anteceded by a prior philosophical conviction; viz, that logic has a traditional and justifiable standing over rhetoric, and that this status has been (illegitimately) overturned. As Johann Michel asserts, for example, “Derrida’s philosophy … should be understood as traditionally metaphysical, since it seeks only to substitute ‘difference, separation and alterity, for a thought of presence, unity, and identity’” (Michel, qtd. in Purcell 2015, para. 8; emphasis added).

It is the illegitimate nature of the deconstructive reversal, then, or more accurately, the bald assumption that Derrida and other French philosophers have undertaken it, that apparently authorizes critics to engage in what appears as a decidedly dismissive approach. For, as I now want to show, the “primacy of the logical over the rhetorical” predates and grounds that very link which “postmodernism” is taken to threaten: the link between a critical epistemological ideal of reason freed from ideology and injustice, on the one hand, and a modern political ideal of progressive, social reform – which is to say, an ethico-political ideal of the ‘good’ – on the other. Precisely because it is so well established in the history of Western philosophy, in other words, the priority of logic over rhetoric pre-empts, and is regularly taken to have the authority to pre-empt, the modernism–postmodernism debate. The question that must be addressed first, therefore, is how the priority of the logical over the rhetorical – or, in Habermas’s formulation, the primacy of the “problem-solving” capacity of philosophy over the “world-disclosing” capacity of fiction or the literary – ensures the a priori legitimacy of the modernist position and, relatedly, whether that primacy is in fact as secure as is supposed.

It is particularly significant, therefore, that in an essay that predates Habermas’s “Excursus” on deconstruction by some five years, Paul de Man goes a substantial way towards answering these questions. He writes,

The most misleading representation of literariness, and also the most recurrent objecti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Naming the Stakes
• PART II: The Ends of Education
• PART III: On Deconstruction and Justice
• References
• Index